Skip to main content
Main

Roast Fowl, French Style

Roast fowl with tepid butter, bread crumbs, lemon sauce, gravy, and minced parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Fowl, French Style

Ingredients

Directions

Roast and coat

  1. Remove the fowl from the fire when it is nearly done.

  2. Pour tepid butter over the fowl.

  3. Spread the butter thickly with fine bread crumbs.

  4. Sprinkle more butter over the crumbs.

  5. Dip the fowl into additional crumbs.

  6. Return the fowl to the fire until it is a clear, light brown all over.

Serve

  1. Carefully place the fowl into a dish.

  2. Serve with lemon sauce and gravy thickened with minced parsley.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Provides the main body of the dish, cooked through by the fire and kept moist beneath the crumb coating.
Tepid butter
Carries fat over the surface, helping the crumbs stick and encouraging an even golden browning.
Fine bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust on the outside of the fowl.

The step that matters

Returning the fowl to the fire. Heat must brown the crumb coating without drying the meat. Too little heat leaves the crust pale, while too much or too long over the heat can dry the bird and scorch the crumbs.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes